ACCURATE co-PIs have given talks, including several keynote addresses, about electronic voting to the ACLU, the League of Woman Voters, and at many other organizations’ events. The work of the ACCURATE co-PIs has raised public awareness to the point where in the past few years, several states have passed laws requiring paper records of votes. Many other states are considering similar legislation, as is the federal government.

Here are some specific activities of ACCURATE participants in the media.

Summary: Joseph Hall, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, discusses e-voting. Hall explains the often muddled differences between electronic and internet voting, and talks about security concerns of each. He also talks about benefits and costs of different voting systems, limits to having meaningful recounts with digital voting systems, why internet voting can be a bad idea, and the future of voting.

Summary: David Dill discusses security issues with electronic voting machines in California in the wake of the California Secretary of State’s Top-to-Bottom Review (TTBR). Dill was not part of the TTBR, but many other ACCURATE personnel were. Here he comments extensively on the implications of the TTBR findings.

The State of California is racing to fix unexpected problems with its voting machines before its Feb. 5 primary. NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels reports from the Golden State on these recent ballot troubles.

Summary: This talk begins with our experiences in real elections where we have observed these issues in the field, including a disputed primary election in Laredo, Texas as well as the recent Congressional election in Sarasota, Florida. These issues motivate a new design for a voting architecture we call “VoteBox” which networks the voting machines in a polling place, allowing for replicated, timeline-entangled logs which can survive malice and malfunction to provide a verifiable audit of election-day events. The talk concludes with a discussion of the findings from the California Secretary of State’s “Top-to-Bottom” Review (TTBR) of voting systems, which we participated in.

Summary: Computer scientist Avi Rubin talks about the plusses and minuses of electronic voting. Critics say that with just weeks to go before the election, some serious flaws in electronic voting systems have yet to be resolved.